Category: The Future of Religion: Two Views

What is the future of religion? Is it even meaningful to speak of “religion” as an entity with a single future, or can we speak only of individual religions that wax and wane? For generations, humanists, atheists, and freethinkers (along with most sociologists) expected religion-as-a-whole to decline in the wake of expanding education and prosperity. …

Advanced sociological research has determined that dysfunctional socioeconomic factors are responsible for the origin and historical popularity of religious faith and that sci ence, secure prosperity, and consumerism are radically undermining faith all across the first world. Contrary to naysayers, the so-called secularization hypothesis (which predicts that social and scientific advances will drive a gradual …

The “Great God Debate” that ushered in the twenty-first century of our so-called Common Era brought atheism to the top of U.S. best-seller lists. This in itself i s historic: nothing quite like it has happened since the 1890s, when Mark Twain, Robert Ingersoll, and Jack London—world-class nonbelievers all—held mass audiences spellbound with their radical …